I was reading the rules of Beehaw.org and they opted to disable downvotes, and I see other instances doing the same.
The main reason is that often the downvote is used as “I don’t like it” instead of “This is not relevant to this community”; in the latter case, I think the “report” button is the correct action to perform.
What are your thoughts on this?
I think things can still be relevant to a community and be disliked. At the moment this is mostly an art sharing community, but I saw some talk about creating subcommunities revolving around nsfw discussions and recommendations.
While I doubt downvoting would be used much, I can see it filtering out low effort content or show disagreeable ideas in discussion based communities. Because of that, I dont see an immediate reason to remove this feature.
I also like the idea of a community having slight self governance to take some of the burden off the mods.
In !gonewild there are a few people that seem to downvote all male content.